


What life would be like as one of your ribs

by lotesse



Category: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Genre: Episode: s01e18 Murder on the Rising Star, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Partner Betrayal, Sex Work, Two Truths and A Lie, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-08 03:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17378684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: Two truths and a lie about “Murder On The Rising Star.”





	What life would be like as one of your ribs

_At the triad match:_

Cassiopeia watches her man fight. Red marks come up on the bare flushed expanses of his skin where Ortega's counterblows have landed on his flesh and bone. By bedtime, she knows, they'll have darkened into a dapple of bruises. But in the moment Starbuck scarcely seems to feel them; he's radiant, a god of heat and rage and gold, standing there in the slanting light of the arena corridor, strong and vigorous and seemingly insensible to pain. 

Above him in the stands, she preens in front of Athena and Sheba, who have both obviously noticed that Starbuck is beautiful in motion, delectable in the heat of his temper; she is hotly aware that Athena has tried for him and failed, and very much enjoys the fact that Sheba's never even tried it out. Starbuck is definitely outside of Sheba's weight class. No, Sheba's been trying for Apollo, funny awkward transparent Apollo, but hasn't managed even that comparably easy conquest. 

Cassie had met Sheba's mother, once, back on Gemon, before the Destruction when the world had been different. Sheba is very like her, not least in her seemingly endless capacity for defeat. 

Gemon is gone now, burned away to a dark cinder of ash and stone, far back behind them in the vast reaches of open space. 

Cassie doesn't mean to be so coldly perceptive and judgemental with the other women on the Galactica, really she doesn't. She just has this old ingrained habit of reading people, mentally assembling dossiers on them, that's a holdover from the skills she'd used on her paying clients, and it has proven impossible to abandon in these new and even more claustrophobic quarters.

The violence of the match escalates. She hangs on the edge of her seat. When the combatants storm out of the ring she follows them. She sees Starbuck and Ortega fighting in the corridor, and when she moves to stop it, Starbuck's habitual submission to her will and commands seems all the sweeter: to know that he could be wild, but doesn't chose to disobey her. It means that his wildness is hers to control, and implicitly is hers to wield. It's a form of power that she relishes.

Cassiopeia has always liked dangerous, sanguine things. Serious Apollo hadn't cared at all for her lost lover Cain, had called him a deserter and a braggart to his face – and it had all been very exciting. Perhaps Cain was all of those things and more; what did she care? The first time he had come to her bed he had already been an adulterer. She had never had the luxury of mistaking him for a noble man. Starbuck had done so, just as he habitually mistook himself for one. But although he had initially hero-worshiped at the Juggernaut's military altar, Starbuck had followed Apollo in his judgement of Cain as he did in all other things, with doglike loyalty and dedication.

There is an obvious comparison to be made between her two blue-eyed boys. She has a type. And that type, she knows, tends toward the criminal and the murderous. Starbuck might be less cruel than Cain, callous and callow only, unmeaning, without any of the desire to punish that she had sometimes seen in the corners of Cain's cornflower eyes, but she believes him more than capable of killing if his blood is running hot. She knows the type. She knows – she _knows_ – just how wild he could be.

When the word reaches her that Ortega had died at Starbuck's hand, only moments after after the golden moment she'd considered a victory, an ultimate achievement of mastery over her lover's baser drives, the usual sense of shame and inner conflict wells up in her throat: you gloried in his violence, in the situation's sensuality, and because of it things have been destroyed. A man is dead. Your lover is prison-bound. You expected differently? She's always liked dangerous, sanguine, exciting things. And that because of that, the homes that she builds have a tendency to slip out from under her, eroding away as time and entropy take their toll. 

She should care more that Starbuck has a man's blood on his hands. She doesn't. She's a loyal woman, in her way, and burns no less hotly for her certainty of his guilt. Let him kill, be imprisoned, escape; desert, destroy, prove false, she'll stand by him. She can think of plenty of ways to use a lawless man. 

The thought does cross her mind that he might be innocent; Starbuck is all braggadocio, she knows it, and he wouldn't be the first male she'd met to pack more bark than his bite could back. Maybe Starbuck really is a nice Colonial Warrior, deep down inside, the bad-boy insouciance just a put-on, a distinguishing mark to make him stand out and glitter against the sober backdrop of his so-overtly-serious friends. Maybe he would be horrified at her, right now, if he could see inside her heart. But he can't, and she can't see inside of his; and if there's anything her experience of humankind has taught her, it's that that's all to the good.

_In the viper bay:_

His hands are shaking with the impact. His lip curls: let them see what he's willing to do now. He's not going to wait around for any more of their _justice_. If there's anything Starbuck knows, it's when to get out. When it's time to go, dwelling on others' feelings is no good. Frack 'em. Got to see to himself when nobody else will.

After the claustrophobic closeness of the Galactica's corridors, the open height of the viper bay is intense. He doesn't like it; not the openness of space, not the safety of the barracks. A habitation of machines, not men, silvered stinging spaceships sleeping all in a row.

Half a lifetime he's served in the Colonial military, and what has it earned him? He'd stood by Cassie's side, and what had it got him? Oh, sure she still loved him, but she was willing – they all were willing – to believe that he'd killed a man just like that, with no more provocation than a sports brawl. Boomer and Apollo and Adama were willing, all of them. 

Apollo hadn't done enough – not nearly enough – to defend him. He should have told them – should have told them Starbuck would never – like the time Apollo'd told it to him, in the hushed dark of an Academy dorm, when the boy Starbuck had been then had confessed to his patrician, noble best friend that he sometimes worried about his parentage, about being some kind of bad seed, about there being a reason behind the existential rejection that had structured his young life.

He climbs into his viper, and the action is as familiar as breathing and as strange as mortality. He's spent a third of a life in the cockpits of short-range spacecraft; never before has he entered one with disloyalty in his heart. Starbuck had always been happy, proud, to serve. Now, he feels like he could spit venom like a serpent, if he lets himself open his mouth.

He doesn't need to punish them, though. He just needs to leave.

He's prevented. Apollo comes stumbling down out of the lift, jumping to reach the deck more quickly. Starbuck could swear that the fates were trying to tell him something; unfortunately, as the audio came in more and more clearly, the message increasingly sounded like: “you're doomed to bring death to everyone you touch.” 

It would be Apollo, whose face was the face of Starbuck's service, because he wanted to serve _like_ Apollo served, but also wanted to serve _Apollo_. Half a lifetime of sublimated need, the desire of the boy in the darkness for the recognition of his worth in the eyes of his friend, the wholesale adoption of the virtues needed to earn a chance at that reward … 

Moments before, in the chaos of the corridor before he'd made good the first step of this escape, he'd had Apollo framed in the sights of his laser pistol, had been looking at his so-familiar face in a new and wrenching way. It would have been easier if being on the other side had made Apollo less beautiful – but it had not. He'd looked like a plaster saint in a fancy Caprican gallery as he'd spoken.

The images conjured by Apollo's words – “And then what are you going to do? Fire on Boomer? On Sheba? On me?” – had been, in contrast, very ugly, nightmare visions spooling out in a parallel tac display of horrors. 

One was familiar: Apollo dying, flash-burned in space. Ever since he'd sent poor baby Zac off on his borrowed patrol, Starbuck had been haunted by that one. He knew that Apollo would have rather taken that death for himself, spared Starbuck but still kept his mother's departing charge to protect her baby boy. Starbuck had been there that day with Adama and his family in the spaceport on Caprica, four of them that time heading up to the stars, only Siress Ila left behind. It had been his death by rights, not Apollo's, not his starstruck kid brother's, even though Zac had succeeded in snatching it away, and Starbuck still feels it stalking his wake.

Nightmare two, more current, less phatasmagoric: Apollo lying in the corridor, fallen and still, dark hair spilling over waxen and bloodless features as they grew stiff and unfamiliar in death. Discharge the laser pistol now, and Apollo goes down hard. He could almost feel the silky locks coiling around his grasping fingers, terribly vivid and real. He's spent a lot of time over the years listening to, looking at, sometimes even daring to touch Apollo. 

No, he thinks. You do that, you don't go to him as he lies there making noises of appalling pain, you run. If you're lucky you've managed to avoid hitting anything vital, you're praying to deities you're not sure you believe in that maybe they'll grant you the grace to spare his life _one more time_. You don't have a choice. Your life on the Galactica ends the moment you depress that trigger; not only will you have fired on a senior officer, itself a grave offense, you will have shown yourself to be a rabid daggit willing to savage even the ones you love and lay claim to. Adama might be a gentle man, a believer in the Lords' own justice, but he loves his son; he would scourge his murderer down past the bone. 

Would he rather die at Apollo's hand than live free in the knowledge of having struck at him? He feels the chokechain of his loyalty and he gags on it. He hates Apollo in that moment. For just a moment, he longs for the materialization of those terrible dreams. For a moment, dear Lords and Consorts, how he had wanted to bite and snap at the hand that stays him. 

He hadn't fired, then; he had bolted in the face of the nightmares, run away to the safety of the Viper bay. It isn't going to hold for long. The lift has reached the level; Apollo is racing toward him, blaster drawn but mouth open. It's clear he thinks he's going to talk his way out of this, smooth some feathers and find a compromise solution.

The Fleet had rejected his service. Apollo had not trusted him from the first. So let Apollo lie down and die, go quiet, go away and stop looking at him with those great green Anubis eyes, ageless and depthless and sad. 

Starbuck looks at him and shakes his head, decisive, definitive. Not this time will he submit again to the leash. He's got his head, and he means to run. Engage the mechanism; the tylinium canopy lowers slowly to lock down over the cockpit. If Apollo doesn't get out of his way, well, let the engine kickback take him.

_Aboard the shuttlecraft:_

Apollo is focused on the next step ahead of him. Anything else, he fears, and the tension driving him would show – or worse, and more private emotions, Lords forbid.

Karybdis, looming beside them, he could hate for relatively clean reasons: Karybdis was the man who had betrayed Caprica, had let in the rain of fire that had eaten Apollo's family estate – and his mother, lost in the first wave of the attack, vaporized to ash along with her home. Boxey had been traumatized in that attack, too, left pale and silent, huddled in his mother's jacket.

“Bright lad,” Baltar says, his voice a purr between his teeth. “You'll go far.” Apollo swallows hard. Best not to think of Boxey, then. In contrast, the reasons he had to hate Baltar were far less pure.

The shuttlecraft lurched through the crowded space of the fleet. Baltar had glanced, when first they had departed dock, at the spacescape he so rarely saw in those days, what with the incarceration. But it had not been nearly so interesting as the person of his escort, and his attention had rapidly narrowed. 

Apollo was resolute to not be needled; this was all self-inflicted pain, anyway. If he'd done a better job defusing the situation with Starbuck, he wouldn't be stuck here between a rock and – a hard place – trying to get the proof needed to get his buddy off the hook. More than anything, Apollo just wanted it to be over. For his plan to work, he was going to need to sit quietly with old ghosts for a moment. Nevertheless, it was far from comfortable.

You owe it to Starbuck, he told himself firmly. You need him; you need to fix this. Work the syllogism, Captain.

He only hoped that, when the shuttecraft interior audio was broadcast aboard the Galactica, as he'd planned with Boomer, Baltar wasn't in the middle of saying anything particularly embarrassing.

In a low, sinister undertone, Baltar hisses at him, “You look just the same, my dear. It's as if time doesn't touch you. I remember you at fifteen, my dear, remember it as though it was yesterday. A shy, sweet child, politely taking his first steps out into his father's world of language and power, so very dear, and so easily plucked. Have you ever confessed our secret to your idolized father, Captain? Likely not; you were an insecure little thing then, and probably still are now, desirous of approval above all else. Well, give the child his due, he's proved himself deserving of it. He must have worked so very, very hard.”

Apollo does not speak, and struggles not to listen, or remember. It is not easy.

“The noble strike captain,” Baltar mocks him. “Pure heart and chosen guide; I've heard what they say about you on the broadcast nets, Commander's Son. You've done quite well for yourself, I have to admit. There are exciting opportunities to be exploited in the various circulating narratives.”

Apollo shudders.

“If I might give you a piece of advice, _Captain_ ,” Baltar says, and Lords but Apollo recognizes that tone, and despite himself feels the blood draining from his cheeks in response, “I suggest you attempt to avoid buying your own press.”

Apollo says nothing, looks away, tries to hide his face. 

Baltar strikes: “You wear the mask well, my boy, even as if it were your own skin. But we know better, don't we, you and I?”

Baltar's hands are bound and chained, but he raises them both together to stroke the ridge of Apollo's paling cheek with a gloved finger. It is so appallingly familiar. “Poor Apollo. Your father taught you such terrible lies,” he laments, gentle and soft. “That if you are good you will be safe. That your life is not your own. You, his son, are born to higher and purer things.”

“Look,” Apollo says, at last prodded enough to turn, “my father has nothing to do with this. _You_ barely have anything to do with this.”

“I'm sure,” Baltar answers silkily. “I'm sure I don't. I'm also sure that I do, in fact, have a great deal to do with you, now, as ever.” 

“Yeah, well,” Apollo grumps, “we can none of us help our history. For some of us,” he added, throwing out a barb of his own, “that's more of an issue than for others, of course.”

He cuts himself off at that – no need to give Baltar the satisfaction of throwing him some great rant about Apollo's lost innocence or Baltar's crimes against humanity or whatever, when he knows it's what the man wants. Attention, evidence of impact. But the retort also has the beneficial effect of steadying him internally, helping him shake off the disorientation of Baltar's attacks. Apollo had never told anyone, not even Starbuck, although they'd been friends at the time. He knows that Baltar doesn't want it to become public. He knows that, if it did, Baltar would be the one of the two of them to lose the most.

It doesn't mean he wouldn't lose anything, of course – it's been pleasant, for the last fifteen-odd yahrens, to avoid the henning and fuss, the examinations and protestations and guilty parental demonstrations, that he knew by rights to be his just portion. The secrecy would be a loss to be absorbed. Well, he thinks, if there's anything they're all good at, anymore, it's absorbing losses. Better to lose his grip on this secret than to lose Starbuck altogether.

He turns his face forward again, re-disciplining his attention. What's happening to Starbuck is awful; Apollo can't imagine how it must feel, to be unjustly accused of such a terrible crime, suddenly thrust into the spotlight in the most vulnerable way. The most important thing was that someone needed to stand for Starbuck. He wasn't about to let old fears interfere. He'd left Boomer back on the Galactica in the role of Starbuck's Protector. He wished it could be him, there on the spot with his friend, but that was not to be. In this, it was his place to take the hydra by its neck and try to dodge the striking heads. Lords willing, he would win out without a mortal wound, with the truth he sought.

Baltar begins to speak again; and Apollo hears him, because he has to know what is being said, he's there to collect the precious information to win Starbuck's freedom; but in his chest his knight's heart reaches out to the distant stars, and the filth and ugly implications of his enemy's words cease to touch him. Perhaps, he thinks, he should someday have a talk with Dr. Salik or one of his medtechs about this propensity toward grandiose disassociation. But now, he would take the tools near to hand to accomplish this all-important work.


End file.
